When Jesus encountered the scribe who asked what is the greatest commandment, Jesus answered to which the scribe’s response was: “Well said, teacher. You are right in saying, ‘He is One and there is no other than he.’ 33 And ‘to love him with all your heart, with all your understanding, with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself’ is worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.” I think most people gloss over the ending words.
It has been my experience when teaching books of the Old Testament, that people often ask “what is with all the animal sacrifice?” There are certainly passages that describe massive sacrificial offerings. There is the Book of Leviticus which details animal sacrifice but also includes burnt offerings of grains and bread. It all seems quite ritualistic to the modern mind. While this reflection is not the place or time, the entire Levitical system has a purpose and an intention to draw people closer to the Lord and holiness.
What was “owed to God” beyond sacrifice was also a topic of great investigation and debate among the Jewish scribes and religious leaders. The common scribal position was well summarized in the maxim of Simon the Just (ca. 200 B.C.): ‘The world rests on three things: the Law, the sacrificial worship, and expressions of love’ (M. Aboth I. 2). But the scribe seems to have departed from that summary saying that the two great commandments
Deut. 6:5 – “Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.” and
Lev. 19:18 – “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”
have priority over “all burnt offerings and sacrifices.”
We hear that same message in today’s first reading, there is a single line in the Book of Proverbs: “To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the LORD than sacrifice.” (Prov 21:3). That is not an isolated idea. Elsewhere is Scripture we are given the same message:
1 Sam. 15:22 – “Does the LORD delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices as much as in obedience to the LORD’s command? Obedience is better than sacrifice, to listen, better than the fat of rams.”
Hos. 6:6 – “For it is loyalty that I desire, not sacrifice, and knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings”
If we can call “the moral life” the choices we enact in the world because of the two great commandments, the scribe notes the superiority of such a moral life, especially of love, over cult and sacrifice. A careful reading of the texts indicates that “love” is understood as benevolence expressed in works of love which are set above sacrifice because of their atoning significance (cf. Aboth de Rabbi Nathan IV. 2).
But as the first reading points out, the moral life has to be grounded in the two great commandments in which there is an offering of human will and heart to live out life in accord with the will of God as best we are able to discern.
And maybe people will, like the family of Jesus in today’s gospel, think we are a bit addled, but know that we are not only close to the Kingdom of God, in our actions we make the Kingdom at least partially visible through our sacrifice of love.
Image credit The Exhortation to the Apostles | James Tissot | Brooklyn Museum | US-PD